Embrace
Embrace
Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
If you go down to the botanical woods any night this week, you're in for a big-ish surprise with this new show from Vision Mechanics, which promenades its way after dark to an ecologically inclined Shangri-la. With the audience gathered in groups of 20 or so, the show's director and creator Kim Bergsagel and her trusty sidekick lead the throng to an Occupy-style campsite where they introduce us to the wisdom of an enlightened fellow traveller before we're encouraged to eavesdrop on the conversations going on inside the tents. These sound either like heated debate or bickering in what looks and sounds like a pastiche of grass-roots activism.
With a police bust imminent, we're led down assorted paths, where a film by Robbie Thomson uses shadow puppetry and Ewan Macintyre's eastern-tinged backwoods soundtrack to tell the story of the show's inspiration, Amrita Devi. In 1730 Devi was beheaded for preventing the chopping down of trees by hugging them, influencing a similarly-inclined 1970s movement. Beyond this, assorted Indian dancers and aerialists run wild and free while neon signs and voices in headphones preach the evils of technology.
As illuminating a call to arms as such back-packer philosophy is, there's an irony in the fact that without the headphones and hi-tech rig, Vision Mechanics' team of son et lumiere magicians would not have been able to reconstruct the gardens' after-dark landscape in such an atmospheric fashion. It is this multi-media approach that transports the performers and Bergsagel's brand of environmental story-telling back to nature with a meditative flourish.
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